A warning, or an omen?

Excerpt from xkcd ©2020.

The Atlantic has a new piece from writer and journalist Silas House: “A Warning from a Democrat in a Red State”.  He argues, “Everyday Democrats need to see beyond the electoral map to acknowledge the folks pushing for liberal ideas even in the reddest of areas. If they don’t, the cultural divide will grow only wider.” House avoids any discussion of what is necessary to narrow the chasm, though, and how it would ultimately involve forsaking people of color yet again in pursuit of white fellowship.

House feels that blue voters in very red states should be getting more “respect for their defiance”.  That feels like asking for gratitude because you put your dirty socks in the hamper instead of on the floor.  Defiance of people like Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell is the least a person can do.  There aren’t too many people whose professed values, especially if they are Christian values, don’t condemn the current actions of the Republican party and its leaders.  “Professed” is the key word, though.  USAns — white USAns — have a secret underlayment which we won’t declare openly, but which nevertheless drives our actions.

The foundations we conceal are the economic values of exploitative capitalism — selfishness and greed, nurtured by land theft and slavery, sweatshops and prison labor — and the racial principles deliberately fashioned to promote the economic system.  We deflect racism to economics all the time, insisting that it’s because people are poor that they suffer, refusing to acknowledge that because they are black or brown they are disproportionately poor.  Sometimes, though, we don’t bother to deflect.

Silas House’s racial values are front and center.  He bemoans the lack of respect to himself and other red-state liberals, and dreads worsening the “cultural divide” between red states and everyone else.  Both of these statements marginalize people of color.  The first, as I’ve said, demands praise when the behaviors in question are truly the equivalent of socks in the hamper, the lowest rung of service to black and brown people: Don’t support policies and people that actively harm people of color.

If you’re having trouble seeing the racism in the second statement, I wouldn’t be surprised.  It’s usually kept deep in the shadows, but it’s nevertheless a primary tenet of the white supremacy culture that is nourished by racial exploitation: The needs of white people come first.  House needs the political rift — “the cultural divide” — between white people to be diminished, perhaps especially between him and the folks back home in Laurel County.  He does not acknowledge that narrowing the white divide requires us to subordinate the rights of black and brown people to both life and liberty.  White liberals appeal to white conservatives in the currency of those rights; we set aside criminal reform, environmental safeguards, food stamps, voting rights, worker protections, and more.

We cannot bring ourselves closer to white conservatives without stepping away from people of color.

We cannot escape that we are drenched with white supremacy culture, but to truly support black and brown people and communities, we can’t simply concede it; we have to fight the injustices of white supremacy culture wherever and whenever we see them.  That includes when we find them inside: we have to eradicate the hidden values that compromise what we profess to believe.

I will not treat with red-state partisans any longer.  They condone and participate in a system that considers people of color peripheral, inferior, and exploitable, and they live under an illusion of individualism, libertarianism, and exceptionalism that is wholly unsupported by the historical record.  While in these things they differ little from the vast majority of white people, they have shown by their collusion with Trump and McConnell and Cruz and McCarthy — and and and — that they are nearly intractable.  I cannot justify putting time, energy, and money to influence change on such infertile ground — not if I want to serve the causes of racial, economic, social, and climate transformation to maximum effect.

Sometimes the cultural divide is a necessary schism by which justice is restored.

Much thanks to my mentor, Lace Watkins of Lace on Race, and the many black and brown writers whose work I have been privileged to read and who inform my own writing.